Doctors and nutritionists generally agree that obesity increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, certain kinds of cancer, Type 2 diabetes, and is associated with shortened life spans.

But research by Janet Tomiyama, assistant professor of psychology in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences, suggests that the social stigma attached to being overweight also can make people sick.

Tomiyama and her co-authors will present their findings at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Athens next month.

“It’s not just that weight stigma makes you feel bad, which is bad enough,” Tomiyama said. “It’s that weight stigma, in itself, is associated with speedier biological aging.”

Tomiyama and three co-authors at the University of California-San Francisco, where she was a postdoctoral researcher until last year, studied 42 pre-menopausal women who were overweight or obese, but otherwise healthy. They measured the women’s height and weight, their body-mass index (BMI), and took periodic blood and saliva samples. The researchers also asked the women specifically about being stigmatized for their weight: how often that had happened and how humiliated they had felt on a rated scale. All reported some level of weight stigma, from worrying about being negatively judged because of their weight to being denied a job.